Frequently asked questions about thinking, epistemology, and cognitive tools. 6402 answers
You remember things better in the context where you learned them.
Information separated from its context becomes ambiguous or misleading.
Information separated from its context becomes ambiguous or misleading.
Practical wisdom — phronesis — is not the accumulation of knowledge or the mastery of rules. It is the ability to perceive what a situation demands and respond appropriately. Context sensitivity is not a component of wisdom. It is the mechanism through which wisdom operates.
Cognitive offloading works only when it is habitual. Externalization practiced daily compounds into an extended mind. Externalization practiced occasionally produces scattered artifacts that never cohere into infrastructure.
An unwritten commitment is an invitation for your future self to renegotiate. Externalized commitments become binding infrastructure — visible, trackable, and resistant to the drift that lives between intention and action.
Feedback you only hear once is feedback you will distort, remember selectively, or forget entirely.
Your notebooks, tools, and systems are not aids to thinking — they are part of your thinking. When a tool plays the same functional role as a cognitive process, it is a cognitive process.
You can examine your own mental models and evaluate whether they serve you.
Your schema about a thing is never the thing itself — useful but always incomplete.
Multiple schemas can apply to the same situation and the one that wins shapes your response.
Established schemas persist even when contradicted by evidence.
A schema that works in one context may fail entirely in another.
Teams that share mental models coordinate better than teams that do not.
Every category you create determines what you group together and what you separate.
There is no single correct way to categorize — categories serve purposes.
Classifying items by importance or urgency enables systematic decision-making.
Classifying items by importance or urgency enables systematic decision-making.
The best category systems adapt as you learn more about what you are organizing.
The best category systems adapt as you learn more about what you are organizing.
Knowing what enables what reveals where small actions create large effects.
Connecting abstract principles to concrete examples makes them usable.
Connections that exist today may not have existed yesterday or may not exist tomorrow.
Too detailed is as unhelpful as too abstract — match the level to your current need.